Happy Birthday, My Sweet Melissa

Today marks the fortieth time I get to spend with my dear wife Melissa on her birthday...1986 was the first, shortly after we met.  Yes, for most of us today marks the annual celebration of love known as Valentine's Day...we're into that as well.  Melissa, what a blessing you have been and are to me...let's keep it going with these birthday celebrations for several more decades!  I love you so much...

Recently Assembled Jigsaw Puzzle of Mount Rushmore

 

Mount Rushmore, near Rapid City, South Dakota, is one of the places I'd like to visit some day.  Situated in the state's Black Hills, the huge faces carved in granite depict four historically-significant US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.  This National Memorial was sculpted, after US government authorization, by Gutzon Borglum, but the use of federal lands whose ownership is disputed by Indians has made the project, starting in 1927 and completed 14 years later, somewhat controversial.  My experiences with Mount Rushmore are tightly connected to the climactic scene in the great 1959 Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller North by Northwest, in which hero Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flee there to escape the murderous bad guys, led by James Mason and Martin Landau.  The irony of it all is that the actual "Mount Rushmore" footage was done on models created for filming in Southern California!  Yes, I'd dig going over to South Dakota to check it out, as well as the nearby memorial to Crazy Horse that has been under construction since 1948 and still is far from completion.  Anyway, Mount Rushmore was the setting shown in one of my seven Americana jigsaw puzzles, pictured above...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 3

This past week I only managed to read one short story in editor Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, and which features his picks published in the year 1999.  Back then I was working at the Gainesville postal processing facility, sorting out mail on their flat-sorting machine while doing the graveyard shift.  That meant I was awake all night and could listen to late-night talk radio, most notably Art Bell's kooky, quirky Coast-to-Coast AM show that explored the paranormal, UFOs and conspiracy theories, to name a few topic categories.  But back to the Dozois anthology... 

GALACTIC NORTH by Alastair Reynolds

This is a tale of three people, very much in the future when humanity has not only spread out and settled the cosmos but has also mastered biology and medical science to the point that heads can be severed...and preserved, to be later reattached to the body.  Yes, it's pretty scary and gross, but the real horror to this true horror/science fiction story is the unintended consequence of the development of terraforming technology that is unleashed into the wild reaches of space, to develop on its own beyond anyone's control.  A woman is committed to protecting the thousands of "sleepers" on board her ship, but must land it on an asteroid as a ferocious, sadistic pirate seeks her cargo and forces her partner to betray her.  The rest of the story relates her very-long quest for revenge against both of them, and against the backdrop of a nameless doom destroying all known life in the galaxy.  Pretty heady stuff...normally I'd say that stories like this leave me cold, but somehow this time it all clicked together...

Next week: more from 1999...

Melissa and I Attend Our Second Candlelight Concert

Last December 17th Melissa and I went to downtown Gainesville to attend a Candlelight Concert at the Hippodrome Theater...click HERE to read the article I later wrote about our experiences then.  This evening we went back down there to the same place for yet another concert, this one a tribute to the Beatles.  The featured string quartet performed their renditions of several Beatles hits and is based in Jacksonville...I recognized most of the players from before.  I was seven years old when I heard my first Beatles song, I Want to Hold Your Hand, which the Fab Four, as the Beatles were often dubbed, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964...our Candlelight Concert musicians performed this one as well.  They also went through several years and albums, doing Help!, Michelle, Eleanor Rigby, Here There and Everywhere, I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends, All You Need is Love, Penny Lane, Hey Jude, Lady Madonna, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Blackbird, Come Together and Here Comes the Sun. The audience was very enthusiastic and appreciative of this show, as were Melissa and me.  They are quite the talented and inspired musicians, these four, and we look forward to another visit with a different theme.  The only drawback I saw was the tight, restricted parking available downtown...even the quartet commented on that...

About Yesterday's Super Bowl Contest

A few weeks ago at the start of the National Football League 2024 season playoffs, I listed the participating teams in the order of my liking.  For the American Conference I had Kansas City as my favorite and with the National it was my home state's Tampa Bay...with Philadelphia in second place.  So yesterday's Super Bowl matchup between the Chiefs and Eagles was pretty good as far I was concerned.  Yet although back then I liked KC more than Philly, something happened during the course of events that reversed that.  Former Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll is someone with an admittedly flawed past (see his tenure coaching USC), yet I was captured by his style and enthusiasm while coaching in the pros.  And he has just been hired as the new head coach of the Raiders, a team that I had grown to root against over the course of the decades.  Formerly based in Oakland, and for a few years in Los Angeles, they are now in Las Vegas and are big division rivals of Kansas City.  Beyond my geographical support for Florida teams, I tend to gravitate toward teams whose players and/or coaches earn my respect and admiration.  Already a fan of Pete's, that kind of diminished the Chiefs for me by comparison and elevated the Eagles.  So when Philadelphia pretty much demolished Kansas City in yesterday's Super Bowl held in New Orleans, that was quite all right with me.  I don't know how the Raiders will do next year...it'll be interesting to see how fast Carroll can turn them around from their dismal last-place season in '24.  As for the "who's who" celebrities attending the game, who cares: I'm guessing that most of them were there just to be seen and talked about, including He Who Must Not Be Named...

Just Finished Reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code is a 2009 book by Daniel Coyle that seeks to derive truths about how people successfully develop talent.  Coyle works from the notion that talent, although often considered innate, must undergo a process in order to achieve mastery in any particular area.  He divides the elements of talent development into three parts: deep practice, ignition and master coaching, in the process supplying numerous (maybe too numerous) examples to make his points.   Coyle insists that the growth of myelin in our brains is specific to the things we learn to do, and deep practice contributes to that growth for the specific area.  One breaks a learning project down to chunks, or sections, assimilating each one through repeated failing to proficiency.  Ignition is the spark of motivation exploding into a passion.  And deep coaching involves imparting the appropriate information to the client/student's talent formation at the right time.  Throughout his presentation Coyle refers to special places that seem to produce an inordinate amount of overachievers, and seeks to explain why this is so.  After finishing the book, I had to ask myself what new information he had imparted to me.  Sadly, there wasn't much here...maybe you would get more from it, I don't know.  But with his idea of breaking things down to sustainable chunks, I definitely see that as an affirmation of what I already knew.  And yes, with that deep practice and ignition, I have experienced what some have termed the "flow" state when my progress in an area, suddenly takes off and seems almost effortless.  Do I recommend The Talent Code? Well, it can't hurt and I was able to check it out from my public library, so it didn't cost me anything either.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but sometimes a rereading can provide me a different angle to it all...  

Ran Florida Track Club's Micanopy Ten-Miler Race This Morning

I had long planned to run the 2025 version of the Florida Track Club's February event, the Micanopy 5/10 Miler...I picked the ten miles option, of course.  The day began a little roughly as I experienced a rare bout of insomnia last night and finally just decided to stay up after only about three-four hours sleep.  Then, when I was driving the fifteen miles south through Gainesville and on to Micanopy, I had to contend with some of the thickest fog I have ever experienced.  Still, thanks in part to my Waze app, I got there in plenty of time and handled my pre-race business in time.  The temperature at 8:00 race time was 58 with the pea-soup fog providing 100% humidity...it heated up a bit during the run.  There were 128 people in the race, a little over half doing my ten miles.  I decided beforehand that I would go nice and steady, running with my only walking breaks happening on steep hills.  And there were a few of those that I speed-walked up.  I noticed that the extra five-mile loop that we ten-mile racers went down was configured in the opposite direction from last year's race...later I found out they switched the direction every year.  I liked this year's direction (clockwise) more.  It seems like everything went according to plan, except that I had more energy left at the end and finished second in my age group with a time of 1 hour 36 minutes 50 seconds, more than two minutes faster than my previous personal best (last year) at this distance.  They handed out post-race, as awards, a cool-looking cap with the Florida Track Club logo on it...Melissa suggested I wear it on next week's Depot Parkrun.  And so ends, for the foreseeable future, my running/walking races longer than 5K.  You see, I'm having surgery early in March and it may be a few months before I feel I'll be ready to tackle runs like today's.  That's okay, I just feel grateful for the opportunity for that surgery.  And besides, you and I both know that during the spring and summer here in northern Florida you usually don't see many opportunities for long distance races.  You can view today's race results by clicking HERE...

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dylan

What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.                                  ---Bob Dylan

I quote Bob Dylan here with a little hesitation because I lifted it off Facebook...maybe he really said it or maybe not, but I don't think it reflects unfairly on him if he didn't.  I like it, but with one caveat.  You might say to yourself, sure, Bob, you have all that money, so it's easy for you to downplay its importance.  But I would disagree.  Dylan's gone through both lack and wealth and as such can make a better assessment of money's worth.  My possible difference with his above quote stems from his "wants to do" conclusion.  If what you want to do is avoid discomfort and just live life on an exclusively hedonistic level without regard to your health or the welfare of others, I'd hardly call that being a success.  But if you know what you stand for and incorporate some personal responsibility and social accountability into that "wants to do" in a balanced way, then sure, I'm all on board, Dylan: sign me up...

My Jigsaw Puzzle of Hoover Dam

 

In the box of assorted jigsaw puzzles of Americana that I got a few weeks ago is one of Hoover Dam, the giant engineering project during the Great Depression years in the early-to-mid 1930's connecting the Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations.  Bordering Nevada and Arizona, it takes the Colorado River and functions as flood control, irrigation and a source of hydroelectric power.  Many lives were lost during its construction, but it stands as a "can do" symbol of American know-how and potential.  I've never been to Hoover Dam...have you?  I'm guessing that most visitors have other places on their travel agenda as well, the Grand Canyon probably one of them.  Thanks to Wikipedia for the information about this dam...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here's my second week of looking through the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, presenting the editor's picks of the best short sci-fi to come out in the year 1999.  When 1999 began, the country was in the throes of a presidential impeachment as the Republican Party decided to score political points against the current Democratic president, Bill Clinton, after he was discovered to be lying about a consensual affair while in office.  In light of the current occupant of the White House and his own much more serious shenanigans, it's amazing how the level of partisan political divide in this country, as well as the standards of behavior expected of our leaders, has deteriorated.  But I'm reviewing stories, right?  Here's what I thought about the next two appearing in the book...

1016 TO 1 by James Patrick Kelly

Read "10 to the 16th to 1", this story has a distinct Stephen King feel to it...awesome! It's October 1962 and a boy has to come to grips way too early in his life with the politics of impending nuclear Armageddon after he encounters a strange man named "Counts", who seems to know all about the future.  What does this individual want, and which direction will history go if he fulfills his new-found "friend's" modest request regarding then-President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis?  The story's ending should be sobering for all of us here in 2025...

WINEMASTER by Robert Reed

Many years ago the 1960's hit science fiction series The Outer Limits has an episode starring Robert Culp titled Demon with a Glass Hand.  The premise with Reed's tale here is similar, as in a rather dystopian future a whole segment of humanity has been miniaturized...and the authorities, after criminalizing their existence, are out to get them.  One individual, named Winemaster, is trying to protect them from the pursuing agent Blaine...it becomes a suspenseful battle of wits...

Next week: more from "party like it's" 1999... 

My Preferences with NFL Teams Over the Years

A few minutes ago I was watching the Fox Weather Channel, and the two announcers were taking a brief break from their meteorological meanderings to shoot the breeze, so to speak, about their loyalties to different NFL teams.  With them, there was that early support for a team that they grew up around.  But as adults living in other places and following certain players and coaches, their preferences over the years changed with their new situations.  That's me, too.  I grew up in the South Florida area, just a few miles north of Miami, and as such was a big Dolphins fan. Their early seventies' Super Bowl appearances (3) and wins (2)...not to mention that still-unmatched season of 1972...more than likely extended that loyalty for many decades beyond, even long after I had grown up and moved away from the area.  I still like to see them succeed, but feel they blew a golden opportunity for greatness a few years ago when they let go head coach Brian Flores.  And their current "star" quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, although admittedly talented, had established himself as an injury-prone, "fragile" athlete even back when he was taking hikes at the University of Alabama.  But the Fins coach Mike McDaniel...unlike Flores...has insisted on sticking with Tagovailoa, and, frankly, it's been painful watching Miami play, either with Tua in there or on the sidelines while his backup struggles.  No, of late I've tended to be more of a Tampa Bay Bucs fan if geography figures into the equation, although I've just never gotten myself attached to Jacksonville, which is much closer to Gainesville.  But I also now tend to root for certain players and coaches regardless of where they work.  One of these is Pete Carroll, who piloted his Seattle Seahawks to two Super Bowl appearances and one victory...he has an infectious, positive, exuberant sidelines attitude, totally into the game and his players' welfare.  Pete has just been hired as the Las Vegas Raiders new head coach...I guess now I'm a Raiders fan! Oh, and regarding the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, I think they're both pretty cool, too...

My Jigsaw Puzzle of Stature of Liberty with Manhattan Background

The above image is yet another jigsaw puzzle I've recently assembled, this one a view of the Statue of Liberty in the Hudson River with Lower Manhattan...highlighted by the New World Trade Center skyscraper in the background.  I've been to New York City only once, back in 2010 with Melissa and Rebecca, and that time was very special to us.  We focused on Manhattan with our visit, staying at the Marriott Marquis hotel on Times Square, touring the whole area and building wonderful memories of the place.  Of course, back then the World Trade Center site was closed off to the public, with construction of the new building just in its fledgling stages.  If you go back on this blog to April of 2010 you'll find a few articles and photos pertaining to that four-day stay.  Some time in the future I'd like to go back, but then again there are also other places I'm looking forward to seeing in person...

Happy Groundhog Day, If You Can Get Past It

Well, at least according to the media treatment I've seen, it looks like Groundhog Day is rapidly achieving a greater status of recognition as a holiday.  No doubt the Bill Murray comedy with the same name has contributed much of the enthusiasm, but that movie came out way back in 1993...something else must be generating it as well.  We have been experiencing some pretty nutty winter weather as of late...especially down south with all the snow...maybe folks are more interested in the weather patterns.  Then, maybe people have decided to actually believe that animals like groundhogs really can predict the weather...judging from the recent presidential election result, they seem to be more susceptible to all kinds of bullshit, no matter how ridiculous.  For me, the movie, with Murray's Phil Connors character having to live the same day over and over again with no end in sight, carries with it not only the promise of a queer kind of immortality, but also the security of knowing exactly what will happen next in life and being able to learn how to be the best in just about anything.  Well, I'm reasonably confident that when I wake up after going to bed tonight, it will be the next day, February the 3rd...no immortality guaranteed, at least in this fleshy body, but it's still a reset if I let it happen.  Each day a new beginning...that sounds like a good formula to me, good weather or bad...  

Speed-Walked the Depot Parkrun 5K in Gainesville This Morning

In Gainesville this morning, unlike for the previous two weekends, extreme weather was not a factor in my racing.  For today's Depot Parkrun 5K, held at that park a little ways south of downtown, the temperature was a pleasant 57 degrees at 7:30 race time although the humidity was a little bit heavy at 93%.  I decided to speed-walk the 3.1 miles, seeing that it had been a while since the last time and I do like the idea of walking fast instead of running on at least one 5K per month.  There were a lot of runners and walkers this morning...later on at 11 am there was another race in the area that drew several hundred entrants.  I enjoyed pushing myself on this walk, but as before it seems that I've hit a wall when it comes to making a breakthrough with my time.  I want to get my speed-walking best time below 38 minutes for a 5K, but today I crossed the finish line at 39:15.  I wonder whether the slightly slippery asphalt surface...due to earlier showers...had anything to do with slowing me down.  I enjoyed the event, though...click HERE to view the results.  Next week the Florida Track Club is staging their annual Micanopy 10-Mile run, and I've already signed up for it.  I'm hoping the weather remains reasonable for that race as well, but there's no telling what it will be like from week to week...

Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies turned into the cosmos.  We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.                                    ---Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein here sounds a bit like the late Carl Sagan, who once on his Cosmos TV series proclaimed that we were made of "star stuff".  Without referring to dogmatic religious ideology handed down from generation to generation and often enforced through state-sponsored coercion, I like to speculate from time to time on our fundamental natures and the relationship between our perceived subjective identities and the objective reality of the world around us.  I think Einstein pretty much put it down accurately, beyond the quote's poetic quality.  I think that those of us who experience the grief involved in surviving the loss of a loved one...and ultimately that is a fate for each of us who are "survivors"...have to come to grips with the real value and significance of that departed person's life as they lived out their life span.  Each of us has our own "end" as well, but until then may my soul sing songs of gratitude and love through my own biochemical garments...

My January 2025 Running, Walking and Swimming Report

On this next-to-last day of the month, I thought it was close enough to the end to discuss January regarding my running, walking and swimming.  Let's eliminate swimming up front: it didn't happen in January, primarily because of colder-than-usual weather.  With walking...at least speed-walking...I still practiced it at home but didn't do it in any of my races.  I'm considering speed-walking the Depot Parkrun 5K this coming Saturday morning, but that's in a new month.  Now with running, there's a lot to report.  On New Year's Day I ran my first officially timed mile since college in the fall of 1974 (I did a passable 5:25 then at age 18).  It was the Frank Shorter Mile, organized by the Florida Track Club, and I enjoyed the experience although I was much slower than decades ago at 8:25.  In mid-January the same group held the Mary Andrews Half-Marathon, which I completed under adversely cold weather conditions after it was delayed a day because of thunderstorms.  A week later I did the Newnan's Lake 15K in similarly freezing conditions.  The rest of January saw me finish four Depot Parkrun 5Ks, three of them all-out runs and one a walk with Melissa through the course.  At home I practiced running daily, and added some resistance training, regularly and incrementally doing push-ups and dead hangs.  In January my date for prostate removal surgery was set in early March, and I've been cleared to continue with my running and other athletic activities.  I already signed up to run the Micanopy Ten-Miler race on the 8th...it will be my third time with this event.  Otherwise, I plan to go to Depot Park and run or walk their Saturday morning 5K race.   I feel completely well and energetic, which as I've written before doesn't exactly mesh with my recent prostate cancer diagnosis.  Oh well, looking forward to new adventures, athletic or medical...a little travel at some point would be cool, too...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin reviewing stories from the year 1999 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection.  I remember that year...besides Prince's 1983 anthem heralding its coming...as being full of uncertainty about the coming Y2K, that is the year 2000, and the feared shutdown of computer-based society that was supposed to descend on us after the calendar changed at midnight.  Of course, nothing came of that...I wonder, though, about this acceleration in the development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence and ask myself whether maybe folks weren't worrying about the wrong thing.  In any event, below is my discussion of the one story I've being reading for the past week. Once again, it's a novella: Dozois sure loved "long" short stories...

THE WEDDING ALBUM by David Marusek

The anthology's editor, in his preface to this tale, referred back to an earlier story by Marusek titled We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.  Both of them take place in the not-too-distant future, when biological and digital advances have brought into question the meaning of what it means to be alive and possess identity.  Told from the shifting perspectives of "sims", that is animated, life-size copies of real people that can freely be altered or even deleted at the "real" owners' discretion, the author seems to be forwarding the notion that artificially-constructed intelligence deserves some recognition for its own rights and interests.  In a world being overtaken in the 2020's by rapidly accelerating advances in AI, this to me portends something likewise that may be on our horizon.  That said, the story was hard for me to follow as the narrative had a tendency to confuse what is real with what isn't...

Next week I'm forging ahead with more stories from 1999 (hope they're easier to follow)...

My Songs of the Month for January 2025

Since I now have on my Amazon account unfettered access to music, I've decided to make more of an effort to keep up with the current songs out there.  Not any kind of music though: I'm partial to indie/alternative rock.  They have a channel called Indie-Rock, so in the past few days I've checked out what's coming out.  Back in the early 1970's, when I was in my mid-to-late teens, I used to decide my own personal "song of the month" according to my likes...I'm thinking of resuming that.  Let's see, what are my top songs of January 2025?

1 Everyone Out...by DIIV (pronounced "dive")

2 The Narcissist...by Blur

3 Starburster...by Fontaines DC

4 Zero Sum...by the Smile

All of the above are in the indie-alternative-rock genre of popular music...you can listen to them/watch their videos on YouTube, too.  There's another song I've heard from time to time that I like, but don't know how to find out who did it or its title...maybe it'll resurface sometime...

Recent NFL Playoffs, Tennis and Golf

This past weekend saw me following three different sports, and each of their time circumstances made a difference.  The Australian Open tennis tournament, one of the year's four Grand Slam events, takes place on the other side of the world, so it wasn't surprising that the men's final match between Jannik Sinner and Alexander Zverev took place live at 3:30 AM Eastern Time.  Wanting to watch it later without knowing in advance who won, I went on YouTube to see if they had a prerecording of the championship match. But the finale's result was all over the site and I didn't stand a chance of not knowing that Sinner had won.  Oh well...

There was a PGA golf tournament this weekend as well, the Farmers Insurance Open out on the California coast.  The four rounds were each moved ahead a day in order for the final round to take place on Saturday and not compete for network TV coverage with the NFL conference championships games on Sunday.  I enjoyed the close finish of the Farmers as Harris English calmly parred hole after hole to win it by a single stroke...

The National Football League conference championships, held on Sunday, both went the way I wanted as Philadelphia convincingly beat Washington 55-23 and Kansas City barely squeaked by Buffalo 32-29. Controversy seems destined to follow the Chiefs, who have been accused on social media of being unfairly favored by questionable officiating.  A couple of the calls by Sunday's officiating crew were crucial to the game's outcome: an apparent fourth down conversion late in the game by the Bills was called to be short and a Chief receiver's called reception on a deep pass was shown on replay to touch the ground.  I thought Buffalo played well enough to win, but so did Kansas City.  Now it's on to the Super Bowl a couple of weeks from now as KC and Philly meet in the Big Game for the second time in three years...

My Cloud Gate, Chicago Jigsaw Puzzle

 

Cloud Gate, or as it is commonly known, the "Bean", is situated at the northern end of Chicago's Millennium Park.  Made from stainless steel to resemble mercury, it was designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor and completed in 2006.  Melissa, Will and I visited it in 2019...click HERE for a link to that article on this blog.  I recently enjoyed putting together this jigsaw puzzle, not only for the beautiful work of art it shows as well as the background of Chicago, but also for the personal memories of being together with our son as we enjoyed the sights of the Windy City...